Stagecraft porting on DaVinci DM6446
This case study highlights Calsoft Labs’ expertise in porting Stagecraft (FlashLite for the Digital Home) on TI DaVinci DM6446.
Client
Texas Instruments (TI) designs and manufactures analog technologies, digital signal processing (DSP) and microcontroller (MCU) semiconductors. TI is a leader in semiconductor solutions for analog and digital embedded and applications processing.
TI has an extensive range of DSP solutions for various market segments. The DaVinci™ range of Digital Media Processors provides cost effective, high performance solutions for the home multimedia segment. Target applications include digital set-top boxes, media players and entertainment centers
Challenge
With the Flash content becoming popular, it has become very important for multimedia embedded devices to support flash playback. Texas Instruments wanted to provide an optimized flash solution on TI platforms to maintain their competitive edge.
- Flash is a highly performance intensive application. Ensuring high performance levels was therefore a key challenge in porting Flash on to the DaVinci platform. TI wanted a frame rate of 30 fps (frames per second) in order to provide a satisfactory multimedia experience to their users. TI also wanted a modular solution that would enable them to migrate to different TI platforms without modifying the base port
Solution
The Plug-in was developed by integrating Stagecraft with the DSP accelerated multimedia features of DaVinci. The port supports playback of H.264 Video with AAC encoded audio in standard resolution. Video and Graphics are rendered in different planes with facility for overlay. Input devices supported includes, keyboard, mouse and remote control. The Audio / Video player was implemented as a separate run time plug-in module so that it can be modified or enhanced at a later stage without any change required in Flash Core.
Technology
Hardware
TI DaVinci6446 which combines a 300 MHz ARM9 core with a 594 MHz DSP core.
Software
- Stagecraft Version 1.0
- Montavista MV-5.0 running Linux Kernel-2.6.18, Direct Frame Buffer, ALSA sound interface
- TI CE (Codec Engine) APIs for Multimedia decoding
Benefits
- Competitive Edge by having Flash Technology available on TI platforms
- A scalable solution that can be re-used across other TI DSPs also with minimum modifications
- Modular design that allows changes to Audio / Video backend without changing Flash Core